I was never a Q guy. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I don’t trust a text which has no physical evidence that it ever existed. I was always more interested in the Gospel of Thomas—a sayings collection for which we do have manuscript evidence. When I taught the New Testament at Virginia Tech, I taught Q, but that was only because it was the standard textbook way of teaching Synoptic Gospel source criticism. I believed then (and still do) that Matthew and Luke were fluid and interdependent texts of the early second century. Now that I’m studying Marcion’s Gospel, I’m often asked how it relates to Q. In my view, Marcion’s Gospel does not automatically eliminate Q, but it does make Q unnecessary.

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